TOWARDS A ‘POST-NEOLIBERAL’ MODE OF HOUSING REGULATION? THE ISRAELI SOCIAL PROTEST OF SUMMER 2011

After decades of virtually uncontested neoliberalization, Israel was swept by unprecedented protests against a rising cost of living, social inequality, and, most particularly, escalating housing prices during the summer of 2011. Within two weeks, a small protest camp established on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv had grown into a mass movement involving hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Given an ambivalent sense of the significance of urban movements in bringing about social change, the aim of this paper is to analyze whether the Israeli Social Protest was able to push forward a post-neoliberal mode of housing regulation. Building on a framework developed by Brenner, Peck and Theodore (2010) to grasp transformations in the landscape of regulatory restructuring, this article argues that the movement has indeed achieved a far-reaching hegemonic shift in public discourse and has also become an important driver in promoting regulatory experiments. Despite its achievements, however, the movement was not able to challenge the Israeli “rule regime” of neoliberalization because of two structural constraints that were shielded by the most powerful state apparatuses: the commodity character of housing and a neoliberalized land regime, where state-owned land is treated as a profit-machine for public finance.